How Private Tutoring Saved -- or Destroyed -- Public Education

Ding, ding ding ding! That's the bell sounding the start of the next round of the high-dollar battle between districts and tutoring providers over supplemental services.

This MSNBC video clip (requires media viewer and broadband) provides an interesting and slightly different business-oriented perspective on the situation, and includes some numbers I hadn't seen before: Private-public partnership. According to the segment, 2600 tutoring providers nationwide expect to get $900 million in SES revenues.

For another outside perspective, there's also a July Podcast from the School Improvement Industry newsletter that touches on the issues. Again, broadband and MP3 software required.

At its base, far away from what's working for kids, this is a proxy war between the anti-WalMart crew on the left who think that private companies and profit-making are highly suspicious and unlikely to do much good for kids, and those education-bashers on the right who wanted a private school voucher option in NCLB and think that public schools and teachers are unlikely to do any better by kids with tutoring money than they did with all the other money they got in the first place.